Marshall McLuhan: The environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.
Normal Mailer: Well, nonetheless, nature still exhibits manifestations which defy all methods of collecting information and data. For example, an earthquake may occur, or a tidal wave may come in, or a hurricane may strike. And the information will lag critically behind our ability to control it.
Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of literary criticism. See, for example,
Contingency and alternative history (followup here)
Kazin to Birstein to a more general question of how we evaluate people’s character based on traits that might, at least at first glance, appear to be independent of character (followup here)
“Readability” as freedom from the actual sensation of reading
Things that I like that almost nobody else is interested in
Anthony West’s literary essays
I recently came across a book called “Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles,” by literary journalist Jeet Heer. The “Lechery” in the title is a bit misleading, but, yes, Heer is open about sexual politics. In any case, like the best literary critics, he engages with the literary works and the authors in the context of politics and society. He has some of the overconfidence of youth—the book came out ten years ago, and some of its essays are from ten or more years before that—, and there’s a bunch of obscure Canadian stuff that doesn’t interest me, but overall I found the writing fun and the topics interesting.
One good thing about the book was its breadth of cultural concerns, including genre and non-genre literature, political writing, and comic books, with the latter taken as of interest in themselves, not merely as some sort of cultural symbol.
I also appreciated that he didn’t talk about movies or pop music. I love movies and pop music, but they’re also such quintessential topics for Boomer critics who want to show their common touch. There are enough other places where I can read about how Stevie Wonder and Brian Wilson are geniuses, that Alex Chilton is over- or under-rated, appreciation of obscure records and gritty films from the 1970s, etc.
My comparison point here is Louis Menand’s book on U.S. cold war culture from 1945-1965, which made me wonder how he decided what to leave in and what to leave out. I’m a big fan of Menand—as far as I’m concerned, he can write about whatever he wants to write about—; it was just interesting to consider all the major cultural figures he left out, even while considering the range of characters he included in that book. Heer writes about Philip Roth but also about John Maynard Keynes; he’s not ashamed to write about, and take seriously, high-middlebrow authors such as John Updike and Alice Munro, while also finding time to write thoughtfully about Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick. I was less thrilled with his writing about comics, not because of anything he said that struck me as wrong, exactly, but rather because he edged into a boosterish tone, promotion as much as criticism.
Another comparison from the New Yorker stable of writers is Thomas Mallon, who notoriously wrote this:
Thus displaying his [Mallon’s] ignorance of Barry Malzberg, who has similarities with Mailer both in style and subject matter. I guess that Malzberg was influenced by Mailer.
And, speaking of Mailer, who’s written some good things but I think was way way overrated by literary critics during his lifetime—I’m not talking about sexism here, I just think there were lots of other writers of his time who had just as much to say and could say it better, with more lively characters, better stories, more memorable turns of phrase, etc.—; anyway, even though I’m not the world’s biggest Mailer fan, I did appreciate the following anecdote which appeared, appropriately enough, in an essay by Heer about Canadian icon Marshall McLuhan:
Connoisseurs of Canadian television should track down a 1968 episode of a CBC program called The Summer Way, a highbrow cultural and political show that once featured a half-hour debate about technology between McLuhan and the novelist Norman Mailer. . . .
McLuhan: We live in a time when we have put a man-made satellite environment around the planet. The planet is no longer nature. It’s no longer the external world. It’s now the content of an artwork. Nature has ceased to exist.
Mailer: Well, I think you’re anticipating a century, perhaps.
McLuhan: But when you put a man-made environment around the planet, you have in a sense abolished nature. Nature from now on has to be programmed.
Mailer: Marshall, I think you’re begging a few tremendously serious questions. One of them is that we have not yet put a man-made environment around this planet, totally. We have not abolished nature yet. We may be in the process of abolishing nature forever.
McLuhan: The environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.
Mailer: Well, nonetheless, nature still exhibits manifestations which defy all methods of collecting information and data. For example, an earthquake may occur, or a tidal wave may come in, or a hurricane may strike. And the information will lag critically behind our ability to control it.
McLuhan: The experience of that event, that disaster, is felt everywhere at once, under a single dateline.
Mailer: But that’s not the same thing as controlling nature, dominating nature, or superseding nature. It’s far from that. Nature still does exist as a protagonist on this planet.
McLuhan: Oh, yes, but it’s like our Victorian mechanical environment. It’s a rear-view mirror image. Every age creates as a utopian image a nostalgic rear-view mirror image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of touch with the present. The present is the enemy.
That’s great! I love how McLuhan keeps saying these extreme but reasonable-sounding things and then, each time, Mailer brings him down to Earth. Norman Mailer, who built much of a career on bloviating philosophizing, is the voice of reason here. The snippet that I put at the top of this post is my favorite: McLuhan as glib Bitcoin bro, Mailer as the grizzly dad who has to pay the bills and fix the roof after the next climate-induced hurricane.
Heer gets it too, writing:
It’s a measure of McLuhan’s ability to recalibrate the intellectual universe that in this debate, Mailer—a Charlie Sheen–style roughneck with a history of substance abuse, domestic violence, and public mental breakdowns—comes across as the voice of sobriety and sweet reason.
Also, Heer’s a fan of Uncle Woody!